The films A Bathroom of One’s Own (2015) and Man to Man (2012) by artist Zeyno Pekünlü are screened as part of Living Canvas at IMMA to mark International Women’s Day 2025.
In Pekünlü’s practice, the artist traverses public and private manifestations of subordination, and problematises technologies of power. The work inverts expected or normative social functions through deformation, contextual detachment, and re-categorisation of texts and images. Scanning a range of issues, from the constitutive myths of maleness and femaleness as gender roles to questioning knowledge and its distribution, the approach aims to decipher both intimate and social power simultaneously. Rather than creating a moment of enlightenment for the viewer, the work provokes a state of temporary perplexity, disorientation, and non-identification.
About the films
Zeyno Pekünlü
A Bathroom of One’s Own (2015)
Colour Video (found footage), 17:20 minutes
The work A Bathroom of One’s Own takes a sneak-peek at men grooming their hair in the intimate spaces of their bathrooms. A collage of various homemade videos by YouTubers, we watch as men informally share tips and tricks of how to comp, dry, shape, and style hair. In doing so, these men appear to present an imposing performance of casual, intimate information, but they also invite us to a peephole to observe the fragility and eroticism of manhood, a state of being often equated to power.
Zeyno Pekünlü
Man to Man (2012)
B&W video, 5:32 minutes
The work Man to Man is created by the footage taken from popular Turkish melodramas, shot between 1950 and 1980. As part of feminist studies, there has been wide analysis of how women are portrayed in these melodramas, with their unrelentingly two-dimensional and clichéd characters. Part of the narrative in these movies is that whatever happens to a man – be it good or bad – is a result of the woman’s actions. So the artist Pekünlü asks, what happens when women are out of the frame? What do men do when they are alone? The work Man to Man compiles the repetitive interactions of men onscreen in the absence of women. The video can be read as a fiction about the male relationships these movies portray.
About the artist
Zeyno Pekünlü (b. 1980, Izmir) is an artist whose artistic interventions mostly take the form of videos and installations. She previously ran the Istanbul Biennial’s Production and Research Program and the Istanbul Cell of Fellowship for Situated Practice organized by BAK Utrecht. Currently, Pekünlü is working as an instructor at the Media and Visual Arts Department at Koç University. Together with Köken Ergun, she is cofounder of the KIRIK initiative. She is on the editorial board of Red Thread Journal.
Selected exhibitions include Perfect Loop, Gallery Diana, New York (2025); All Her Sighs, Sanatorium, Istanbul (2024); Pretty Furious Women, LUC Athens (2023); The Real Show, CAC Brétigny (2022); 2021 Once Upon a Time Inconceivable, Protocinema (2021); This Place, Yapı Kredi Arts and Culture (2021); 39th EVA International-Ireland’s Biennial (2021); Artists in Quarantine, The Museum confederation L’Internationale (2020); Institute for New Feeling, Artist Film International/White Chapel Gallery/Hammer Museum/MAAT/Istanbul Modern Museum (2016-2017); Zeyno Pekünlü, SALT Ulus (2016); Istanbul; Passion, Joy, Fury, MAXXI Museum/ Salt Water, 14th Istanbul Biennial/ Neither Back Nor Forward: Acting in the Present, Jakarta Biennale/ Every Inclusion is an Exclusion of Other Possibilities, SALT Beyoglu/ Sights and Sounds: Turkey, Jewish Museum, New York (2015).
